Big eyes in a squishy monkey face, a colourful iridescent body, cute little bear ears, and a mousey tail seem like an odd combination, but I’ll admit my dot is adorable. Niantic’s latest mobile game, Peridot, has you raising and breeding these quirky little creatures while exploring the world around you, and it uses Augmented Reality (AR) technology to an incredible degree to the point that your dot can identify flowers, pets, and what type of environment you’re in.
It reminds me of the virtual pet games I played for endless hours during childhood. No, not Nintendogs — I mean the older PC games like Catz, Dogz, and Oddballz. Not Babyz, though, that one was weird. The more I play Peridot, the more I realise it’s essentially a modern version of those games, taking the basics of caring for pets, dressing them up, and playing with them to a whole new level.
The Petz games offered players the chance to adopt and care for virtual pets, and you could invite them into your own space by having them run wild on your PC desktop and interact with them using your cursor. The later sequels had a range of themed areas you could explore, but there was also a location editor where you could upload images of your own home and then set where the floor and surfaces were in the picture, so your petz could jump on actual tabletops and be ‘in your house’. You know, sort of.
Peridot takes this one step further by having your dots explore the actual world around you with AR technology, so you can also see them bounding around your home in a far more sophisticated way.
With Dogz 5, I obsessively paired different dogs together to breed weird and wonderful puppies, changing the clock date on my PC to quicken the process because I didn’t have the patience to wait for days at a time. Peridot has reignited that need to breed — I realise that sounds weird — as it encourages players to breed their dots to create new and exciting combinations of traits and to unlock special archetype stamps.
The downside to Peridot is that obtaining new dots is a frustrating process locked behind a paywall for the most part. You’re given the choice of one of three eggs when you start the game, and then I snagged a free Nest from the store. After that, you’ll need to pay real money to get new Nests and likely some Sundrops, too, both of which you’ll need to breed a new dot.
The breeding process is also much more convoluted than shoving two pets together and spraying them with a love potion. You must track down a real-life player willing to breed and then use a Nest and Sundrops to complete the process. The other Peridot might have traits you want, but they could be locked depending on your level. Even if they’re not, there’s no guarantee your dot will inherit them.
I’m enjoying Peridot, but it could learn a thing or three from its predecessors. Everyone loves breeding and dressing up their little pets, but not everyone has the cash to fork out on virtual items. I’d enjoy the game more if there were a way to do these things through in-game play alone, even if it was a chore to earn them as freebies. I love virtual pets, but not enough to sink cash into them. Now I just want a modern Petz game for mobile that uses the same AR technology as Peridot. Sorry, Niantic.